Young Professionals Forum (YPF) – Challenger Space Mission

The Young Professionals Forum got together recently at the National Space Centre in Leicester for some networking, team-building, fun and games!

Alison Ross, Chair of the YPF opened the day with a welcome and introduction to the attendees, encouraging them to harness and develop their networking skills to support career progression.

The day was all about teamwork and communication and the ‘icebreaker’ games did just that! Some of the group (astronauts) were crammed together on a ‘solar panel’ and the rest of us had to instruct them how to turn the panel over without losing any of our astronauts into space!

Sadly, we failed on that mission, sacrificing a few YPF Committee members, but we had an opportunity to redeem ourselves.  The next mission saw us spilt into three teams as we went head to head in a space race! This involved the teams making a number of prototype rockets that would be launched using an air compressor – practice rounds followed, with extra points awarded for cheating, booing and sabotage! Teams ‘Yellow Bellies’ and ‘Pink Astronauts’ were almost neck and neck at this point with ‘No Space for Losers’ lagging some 200 points behind. However, after the final round, ‘No Space for Losers’ had shot 300 points into the lead (an enterprising astronaut had adjusted the scoreboard). But, hey, they did say to cheat!

Before lunch the teams did some very useful exercises to work on verbal and non-verbal communication skills, helping us to communicate the full picture, not just part of it. After the extreme competitiveness of the space race, this focused the group sharply on adjusting to and awareness of the wider team.  These practice exercises were to come in handy after lunch when we went on our Challenger Space Mission: Earth in Danger!

The team was split into two groups to take on the roles of ‘Mission Control’ and ‘Space Station’ and we all had to work together in order to ‘Rendezvous with a Comet’, gaining vital data for future research by building and sending out a robotic probe!

We were assigned roles in work teams with specific duties such as medical, navigation, life support and probe engineering. In order to accomplish our set goals we had to work together and communicate across the void between the two environments: Mission Control and Space Station.

Each work team had its own set goals, but we all needed to be fully aware of what was going on around us and help out any other work teams that encountered problems. Life support experienced significant problems with a CO2 filter and had to build a new one from supplied components before we all ran out of air!

The Mission Control and Space Station teams switched over for the second part of the mission where we encountered a new comet that would not be seen again for 25,000 years, so the pressure was on to complete the build and launch of a probe to enable us to gain some valuable data before it went out of range – we managed to launch the probe and receive telemetry with just seconds to spare!

First and foremost, the Challenger mission was a lot of fun; developing professional skills and networking opportunities in a truly unique setting. The entire day was designed to help the group learn to communicate effectively and work as a team whilst under pressure. The networking and team-building aspects of the event came naturally through engaging in the activities, and although set in a context that is (literally) out of this world, the situations in which we found ourselves, and the skills we needed, could be related back to real-life work environments.

A great day was had by all – mission accomplished!